Hey Everybody!!! Forum Software Upgrade in the Works

We probably won't be rushing this, but the forum software we are running from vBulletin is getting increasingly outdated, and we are going to be making some changes soon, likely switching from vBulletin to Xenforo.

Xenforo is very similar to vbulletin (but much better) and was created by many of the original developers of vbulletin. They "jumped ship" when the ownership of vbulletin changed. In my dealings with vbulletin in the last year, I have not been very pleased, but quite the opposite for xenforo. You can see it running now on Salsa Forums.

It will surely take a little getting used to for both the members and moderators (who will get an early preview), but it has been our experience that Salsa Forums is almost twice as busy as before the switch, and the moderators have much easier tools to use too that coordinate well with user reports, etc. We did a little spam on salsa forums initially, but we installed some anti-spam tools and it is much better now (using the same tools as here on DF, plus a couple of new ones too).

One nice thing I like is people can "like" one another's posts similar to facebook, and there is a Facebook like notification system for PMs, Likes, etc. You can also share pages on facebook and twitter easily.

Closer to the time, we may start to put up a little donation button hopefully asking people to donate a small amount (say the cost of a group class) to help us with the expenses which will be at least few hundred dollars, so hopefully we'll get a little support.

This is pretty much a necessary change, and we either needed to upgrade from vbulletin 3 to 4, or switch to xenforo. Both are similar in level of difficulty, and I just feel xenforo is the right choice. Have a look on Salsa Forums if you like and let me know what you think.

We were waiting until after USDSC. Likely we will be starting the switch as early as tomorrow and most certainly next week. We will try to warn people a few minutes ahead of time that might be in the middle of making a post.

I am expecting there will be some little tweaks we need to do. Give us a little time as we just got done working really hard on this. But we will be looking for things we need to fix. We already did pretty good on salsa forums and this is our second go around. and moderator settings a and moderator settings are set up pretty good

Not too much a fan of the posts' text being in a darker coloured box...makes it look like it's a quote.

But overall, very impressed.

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Agreed -- there are some cosmetic issues that need attending to (and this is one we're already aware of), but those are relatively minor tweaks that we'll be able to work through over the next couple of weeks. The most important thing is the security afforded by the update, and there's added functionality as a bonus.

I agree 100% Warren - and have already noted this to our tech team. In short, the new software has different default templates and the cosmetic changes will be our next step. The DF database is large enough that just transferring the content was a significant undertaking on its own.

As others have noted, the color scheme could probably use a little tweaking. It's pale enough to be a strain on my middle-aged eyes. BUT, overall, I find the new format to be much more aesthetically pleasing. As soon as I learn to log in, post, quote and send a PM, all will be well with my little DF world.